TWEETS RECENTES

IBM Software Subscription and Support (formerly software maintenance), is an affordable and renewable product upgrade and technical support solution, available for the IBM-distributed software licences you have purchased. Subscription and Support gives you access to new releases and versions of your licensed IBM Software, online technical support, enhanced self-help and search capabilities, and assistance with problem resolution by phone for all Severity 1 situations.

Great! That's a world class service from a world class company!

IBM offers two license acquisition and Software Subscription and Support offerings- Passport Advantage, and Passport Advantage Express. Passport Advantage is designed for larger enterprises. Passport Advantage Express is designed to meet the needs of medium sized businesses. You can learn more about each here.

So, let's say you are ready to upgrade your Rational software, and you have Subscription and Support in place. You login with your IBM ID to Passport Advantage Online and there you see the software you need, ready to be downloaded. Sure there could be a few teething problems while upgrading, and then quite possibly some issues to attend to after the go live date. Having IBM Subscription and Support means you can log these incidents (PMRs) through phone and online technical support using IBM's Service Request system.

Sounds pretty standard as far as support goes? Yes, this is standard support and is an excellent IBM service. But did you know that by having Subscription and Support in place, you can get an even more advanced support and risk avoidance service from IBM? You sure can! Reactive support is critical when you need expert help to address an issue that is affecting your bottom line - you need a resolution as quick as is possible! But if you want those issues handled as priority by IBM to get your environment back to maximum capacity rapidly, and would like an assigned IBM trusted advisor managing and escalating such issues on your behalf, you need to explore IBM's Software Accelerated Value Program (AVP).

Reactive support is one small element of this popular program, as the ultimate objective is to prevent issues in the first place. If you think your environment is fine tuned and you are using all of the functionality of your Rational software to the max, these guys will check it out and most likely find even more efficient ways for you to work with your software! These highly skilled experts are awesome! And if you haven't looked at how you are using you Rational software, or how it is implemented in your ever evolving environment, you could be amazed at how much you could bring down your operational running costs. AVP is much more than support, it gives you a relationship with IBM, someone to fight your corner. The AVP team will also help you to plan for upgrades so you don't encounter frustrating issues, and will help your employees to adopt the most current release of software. Your trusted advisor will even work side-by-side with you to help grow your skills too.

Why not check out what the Accelerated Value Program could do for you by visiting the Accelerated Value Program web page here, or if you prefer, contact the Accelerated Value Program team at software_accelerated_value@us.ibm.com

Once again, here's the most recent list of the latest and greatest downloads which have gone live from Rational Support since July 23rd! We present these links below to help you find the fixes you need in order to stay up to date and successful with your Rational products.... Plus, don't forget to check out the downloads tag to see any of the fixes you may have previously missed:

Sanjeev Sharma blogged on his personal site a few weeks back about the presentation he did for theUnicomDevOps summit in London, UK. in early July. His topic covered "Mobile to Mainframe -- Challenges of Enterprise DevOps Adoption". Following are the slides (the abstract can be found in his original post here):